Explore the vast range of titles available.

LAJSA Book Award Winner, 2017, Latin American Jewish Studies Association As Cuba industrialized in the nineteenth century, an epochal realignment of the social order occurred. In this period of change, two seemingly disparate, yet nevertheless intertwined, ideological forces appeared: anti-Semitism and abolitionism. As the antislavery movement became organized in Cuba, the argument grew that Jews participated in the African slave trade and in New World slavery, and that this participation gave Jews extraordinary influence in the new Cuban economy and culture. What was remarkable about this anti-Semitism was the decidedly small Jewish population on the island in this era. This form of anti-Semitism, Silverstein reveals, sprang almost exclusively from mythological beliefs.

This book deals with Chinese immigrants' role in the struggle for Cuban liberation and in Cuba's twentieth-century revolutionary social movement; the history of the Chinese economy in Cuba; and the Chinese contribution to Cuban music, painting, food, sport, and language. The centerpiece of the book is a translation of a study by Mauro García Triana and Pedro Eng Herrera on the history of the Chinese presence in Cuba. Over many years, García and Eng have collaborated closely on scholarly research on the Chinese contribution to Cuban life and politics, although their work is not widely known. Both are well equipped for such an enterprise: Eng as a Cuban of Chinese descent and a participant in the ethnic-Chinese revolutionary movement in Cuba, starting in the 1950s; García as a participant in the struggle against Batista and Cuban Ambassador to China during the period of the Cultural Revolution. The study is supplemented by an extensive collection of archival photographs and of paintings on Cuban-Chinese themes by Pedro Eng, who is not just a chronicler of the community but a well-known worker-artist who paints in a style described by commentators as \"naive.\" The volume has three appendices: excerpts from the Cuba Commission's 1877 report on Chinese emigration to Cuba; the rebel leader Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui's pamphlet \"The Chinese and Cuban Independence,\" translated from his book Mi primera ofrenda (My first offering), first published in 1892; and the chapter on \"Coolie Life in Cuba\" from Duvon Clough Corbitt's Study of the Chinese in Cuba, 1847-1947 (Wilmore 1971).

Contested Community analyzes the Chinese immigrant community in Cuba between the years 1900-1968, highlighting the asymmetrical power relations that permeated its economic, political, and ethnic structures.

Are all immigrants from the same home country best understood as a homogeneous group of foreign-born? Or do they differ in their adaptation and transnational ties depending on when they emigrated and with what lived experiences? Between Castro’s rise to power in 1959 and the early twenty-first century more than a million Cubans immigrated to the United States. While it is widely known that Cuban émigrés have exerted a strong hold on Washington policy toward their homeland, Eckstein uncovers a fascinating paradox: the recent arrivals, although poor and politically weak, have done more to transform their homeland than the influential and prosperous early exiles who have tried for half a century to bring the Castro regime to heel. The impact of the so-called New Cubans is an unintended consequence of the personal ties they maintain with family in Cuba, ties the first arrivals oppose. This historically-grounded, nuanced book offers a rare in-depth analysis of Cuban immigrants’ social, cultural, economic, and political adaptation, their transformation of Miami into the \"northern most Latin American city,\" and their cross-border engagement and homeland impact. Eckstein accordingly provides new insight into the lives of Cuban immigrants, into Cuba in the post Soviet era, and into how Washington’s failed Cuba policy might be improved. She also posits a new theory to deepen the understanding not merely of Cuban but of other immigrant group adaptation. Introduction 1. Immigrants and the Weight of Their Past 2. Immigrant Imprint in America 3. Politics for Whom and for What? 4. The Personal is Political: Bonding across Borders 5. Cuba Through the Looking Glass 6. Transforming Transnational Ties into Economic Worth 7. Dollarization and Its Discontents: Homeland Impact of Diaspora Generosity 8. Reenvisioning Immigration Appendix I: Field Research \"Based on extensive fieldwork in Cuba and the U.S., Eckstein shows that immigrant incorporation and enduring homeland involvements are cohort specific—how Cubans feel about their homeland and what they want to do about it depends upon when they leave and what they leave with. Her research also shows how the same group settles differently in different contexts of reception. A must-read for migration scholars, Latin Americanists, and policymakers alike.\" - Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College, author of God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape \"Eckstein, one of the leading scholars of contemporary Cuba, sheds light on the most recent and fascinating change in relations between Cuba and its diaspora: Officially, the government of Cuba and the leadership of the Miami diaspora may still hate each other but Cubans on both sides of the Straits of Florida have developed a flourishing relationship of remittances, migration, and transnational societies. This book is a terrific guide to relationships that are bound to develop even more in the years to come.\" - Jorge I. Domínguez, Harvard University, USA \"The immigrant’s journey is a story that has been told often, but never like this. With a sympathetic ear for the poetry of pathos and a critical eye for the data that give her insights depth, Eckstein has written a remarkable chronicle of two Cuban migrations to the United States. The ‘Exiles,’ who left soon after Castro arrived, and the ‘New Cubans,’ who came a generation later, were both changed by the journey, but what makes this book special is that she shows how they also changed both countries.\" - Robert Pastor, American University; National Security Advisor for Latin America, 1977–81 \"Eckstein takes on the timely question of change in the Cuban Diaspora. She looks beyond the initial wave of émigrés to analyze the experiences of the other waves that followed. By tapping this natural case study of immigrant resources and different patterns of incorporation and influence, Eckstein builds a comprehensive theory of immigrant incorporation that accounts for sending and receiving country influences and the role of co-ethnic political organization in the country of migration.\" - Louis DeSipio, University of California, Irvine, USA \"Few social scientists know Cuba as deeply or as subtly as Susan Eckstein. She has written the best sociological analysis of the political evolution of the island during the revolutionary period, Back from the Future . Now, she turns her attention to the Cuban diaspora and, with the same dispassionate eye, tells us of its behavior and its consequences both for their native and their adopted countries. A must-read for anyone interested in Cuba or immigrant politics.\" - Alejandro Portes \"Eckstein’s skillful parsing of secondary data—be they from the U.S. Census or the FIU Cuba Poll, which is used liberally to establish an empirical differentiation between “waves” of migrants—unravels the threads of the Cuban experience.\" - Guillermo J Grenier, Florida International University, Vol. 116, No. 2, American Journal of Sociology. \"Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.\" - M. Vickerman, CHOICE (May 2010) Susan Eva Eckstein is Professor of Sociology and International Relations at Boston University. Author of Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro , as well as numerous other books on Latin America, she is also former president of the Latin American Studies Association and the New England Council on Latin America.

Since the 19th century, assertions of a common, racially-mixed Cuban identity based on acceptance of African descent have challenged the view of Cubans as racially white. For the past two centuries, these competing views of Cuban racial identity have remained in continuous tension, while Cuban women and men make their own racially oriented choices in family formation. Cuba's Racial Crucible explores the historical dynamics of Cuban race relations by highlighting the racially selective reproductive practices and genealogical memories associated with family formation. Karen Y. Morrison reads archival, oral-history, and literary sources to demonstrate the ideological centrality and inseparability of \"race,\" \"nation,\" and \"family,\" in definitions of Cuban identity. Morrison analyzes the conditions that supported the social advance and decline of notions of white racial superiority, nationalist projections of racial hybridity, and pride in African descent.

While it was not until 1871 that slavery in Cuba was finally abolished, African-descended people had high hopes for legal, social, and economic advancement as the republican period started. InBlack Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, Melina Pappademos analyzes the racial politics and culture of black civic and political activists during the Cuban Republic.The path to equality, Pappademos reveals, was often stymied by successive political and economic crises, patronage politics, and profound racial tensions. In the face of these issues, black political leaders and members of black social clubs developed strategies for expanding their political authority and for winning respectability and socioeconomic resources. Rather than appeal to a monolithic black Cuban identity based on the assumption of shared experience, these black activists, politicians, and public intellectuals consistently recognized the class, cultural, and ideological differences that existed within the black community, thus challenging conventional wisdom about black community formation and anachronistic ideas of racial solidarity. Pappademos illuminates the central, yet often silenced, intellectual and cultural role of black Cubans in the formation of the nation's political structures; in doing so, she shows that black activism was only partially motivated by race.

In the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, a key state ideology developed: racism was a systemic cultural issue that ceased to exist after the Revolution, and any racism that did persist was a result of contained cases of individual prejudice perpetuated by US influence. Even after the state officially pronounced the end of racism within its borders, social inequalities tied to racism, sexism, and homophobia endured, and, during the economic liberalization of the 1990s, widespread economic disparities began to reemerge. Cuban Underground Hip Hop focuses on a group of self-described antiracist, revolutionary youth who initiated a social movement (1996–2006) to educate and fight against these inequalities through the use of arts-based political activism intended to spur debate and enact social change. Their “revolution\" was manifest in altering individual and collective consciousness by critiquing nearly all aspects of social and economic life tied to colonial legacies. Using over a decade of research and interviews with those directly involved, Tanya L. Saunders traces the history of the movement from its inception and the national and international debates that it spawned to the exodus of these activists/artists from Cuba and the creative vacuum they left behind. Shedding light on identity politics, race, sexuality, and gender in Cuba and the Americas, Cuban Underground Hip Hop is a valuable case study of a social movement that is a part of Cuba’s longer historical process of decolonization.

Scholars have long heralded mestizaje, or race mixing, as the essence of the Cuban nation.Revolutionizing Romanceis an account of the continuing significance of race in Cuba as it is experienced in interracial relationships. This ethnography tracks young couples as they move in a world fraught with shifting connections of class, race, and culture that are reflected in space, racialized language, and media representations of blackness, whiteness, and mixedness. As one of the few scholars to conduct long-term anthropological fieldwork in the island nation, Nadine T. Fernandez offers a rare insider's view of the country's transformations during the post-Soviet era. Following a comprehensive history of racial formations up through Castro's rule, the book then delves into more intimate and contemporary spaces. Language, space and place, foreign tourism, and the realm of the family each reveal, through the author's deft analysis, the paradox of living a racialized life in a nation that celebrates a policy of colorblind equality.

For those opposed to immigration, Miami is a nightmare. Miami is the de facto capital of Latin America; it is a city where immigrants dominate, Spanish is ubiquitous, and Denny's is an ethnic restaurant. Are Miami's immigrants representative of a trend that is undermining American culture and identity? Drawing from in-depth fieldwork in the city and looking closely at recent events such as the Elián González case, This Land Is Our Land examines interactions between immigrants and established Americans in Miami to address fundamental questions of American identity and multiculturalism. Rather than focusing on questions of assimilation, as many other studies have, this book concentrates on interethnic relations to provide an entirely new perspective on the changes wrought by immigration in the United States. A balanced analysis of Miami's evolution over the last forty years, This Land Is Our Land is also a powerful demonstration that immigration in America is not simply an \"us versus them\" phenomenon.